ARCHIVE 5/23/08: More on the Old Business of the Benoit Tribute
May 19, 2009ARCHIVE 5/25/08: Meltzer: No Calls to Benoit from Scott Armstrong ON MONDAY
May 20, 2009
Not Fit to Print in The New York Times (cont.)
Friday, May 23rd, 2008
The New York Times has not run — and at this point it seems safe to conclude that it will not run — any letters in response to its story last month on World Wrestling Entertainment. Here is my unpublished letter:
Your account of World Wrestling Entertainment as a business powerhouse (business, April 28) misses only in certain details: television ratings have not at all rebounded from historic highs, though revenues and profits indeed remain very strong. But the description of W.W.E. drug policy and practices is like the product itself — spectacularly misleading.
It is a bad joke to characterize the company’s steroid-testing as stringent. Chairman Vince McMahon was the only invited head of a major sports or sports entertainment company to no-show recent Congressional hearings that called for stricter independent protocols in line with the standards of the Olympics.
Moreover, W.W.E.’s so-called Wellness Policy includes a loophole for its cartoon-physiqued wrestlers to have just about any level of drugs so long as they are prescribed by a doctor. Chris Benoit, who murdered his wife and son and killed himself in Georgia last June, passed his W.W.E. drug test two months earlier despite being prescribed a 10-month supply of steroids every three to four weeks by his physician, Dr. Phil Astin, who is now under federal indictment. The Benoit toxicology found that he had a testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio 39 times normal.
In the midst of last summer’s Congressional and media scrutiny, W.W.E. indeed suspended 10 wrestlers who were found, in an investigation by the Albany district attorney, to be steroid and human growth hormone clients of the Internet gray-market dealer Signature Pharmacy. But one of the company performers on the list, Randy Orton — a repeat offender under the Wellness Policy — was not disciplined at all. This reinforced the suspicion that the policy is applied selectively to protect the top stars. Irvin Muchnic